Using OSHA inspection data to analyze respirator protection program compliance

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Respiratory protection standard

OSHA’s respiratory protection standard was promulgated on January 8, 1998 and took effect on October 5, 1998. It has over 150 separate provisions within the 13 major sections of the standard—1910.134(a) to 1910.134(m).

In brief, these are the RP standard’s requirements for employers:

Employers must provide respirators where needed to protect workers’ health.

When respirators are required, employers must establish a written RP program which assures that the activities below will be carried out.

When employees wear respirators when they are not required to, the employer must establish a partial RP program to ensure that respirator use itself does not harm the worker.

Employers must assess whether respirators are needed and provide the appropriate type.

Employers must make sure that employees are medically fit to wear respirators and that tight-fitting respirators have the proper fit.

Employers must ensure that workers wear their respirators appropriately and that equipment is properly cleaned and maintained.

Employers must train workers to use respirators properly.

Employers must keep records to document that the preceding steps have been carried out and periodically evaluate their RP program.

Data and methods

The OSHA Integrated Management Information System (IMIS) collects information from inspections carried out by compliance officers. Since 1991, the IMIS has included data from every state. We obtained inspection data from OSHA through 2006 and linked all violation data to the inspections in which the violations were cited. However, the IMIS does not have a common identifier either at the establishment or the firm level. (In the IMIS, the term “establishment” generally refers to a single workplace or facility.) Although some linking can be done by simple name and address matching, there are variations in how names and addresses are recorded, which can leave uncertainty in many cases. Because linking at the establishment level is important for this study (as well as many others), we rely on probabilistic matching to link inspections to the establishment level.7

In 29 states, the federal OSHA directly operates the enforcement program in the private sector. The other states operate their own enforcement programs upon OSHA’s certification that the state’s program is “as effective as” the federal program. The great majority of these “state plan” states have adopted all of the federal standards and use the same codes. However, a few states, including California, Oregon, and Washington, have their own distinct set of standards for all or some hazards. For this reason, we excluded these three states from this analysis.

The IMIS variables that we use in this study include

number of employees at the establishment

Standard Industrial Classification

inspection type—e.g., programmed or complaint

safety or health inspection

scope—comprehensive or limited

union—yes or no

whether a worker accompanied the compliance officer

year—i.e., opening date of the inspection

standards cited

current violation type—e.g., serious, other than serious

Table 1 presents the number of RP violations cited by OSHA in different industry sectors from 1999 to 2006. We present our findings for the manufacturing sector as a whole and for the major 18 two-digit industries within manufacturing. We excluded inspections in tobacco (SIC 21) and leather (SIC 31) from our data because of the small number of inspections in each industry.

Note: Column 1 (total establishments in industry) is based on 1997 County Business Patterns. All figures exclude California, Oregon, and Washington. RP violations exclude 1910.134(c)(2).

Sources: OSHA IMIS, BLS RUPS study, and authors' calculations.

Survey of respirator use in the private sector

In 2002, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) carried out a survey of respirator use on behalf of NIOSH. The mail survey of “Respiratory Usage in Private Sector Firms” (RUPS) was conducted from August 2001 through January 2002 using a representative sample of U.S. employers. Establishments included in the sample were selected from the Longitudinal Establishment Database, which is maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. All establishments in the survey were located in the 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. The final sample size was 40,002 private industry establishments. The survey provides estimates of the numbers of establishments and employees who were in establishments in 2001 where respiratory equipment was required or worn voluntarily during the previous 12 months.

The survey also provides estimates of the types of respirators used and information about how establishments have implemented OSHA’s respiratory protection standard. In addition, the survey provides breakdowns by establishment size as well as information about the types of hazards that the respirators are protecting against.

Notes

7 The program for doing this is described in Wayne B. Gray and John M. Mendeloff, “The declining effects of OSHA inspections in manufacturing, 1979–1998,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review (July 2005), pp. 571–587.